The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [122]
But then he noticed the error, the dull truth rising up and fitting just where he’d expected it, in that hollow place just below his ribs: the name on the letter was not his. The address was right, and every other detail from his date of birth to his social security number—all these were correct. And his first two names, David for his father and Henry for his grandfather, those were fine as well, typed precisely by a secretary who had perhaps been interrupted by a phone call, by a visitor. Or maybe it was only the lovely spring air that made her look up from her work, dreaming herself into the evening, her fiancé there with flowers in his hands and her own heart trembling like a leaf. Then a door slammed. Footsteps sounded, her boss. She started, drew herself together and back into the present. Blinking, she hit the return carriage and went back to work.
David Henry she had typed already, correctly.
But his last name, McCallister, had been lost.
He had never told anyone. He had gone off to college and registered, and no one ever knew. It was, after all, his true name. Still, David Henry was a different person from David Henry McCallister, that much he knew, and it seemed clear it was as David Henry he was meant to go to college, a person with no history, unburdened by the past. A man with a chance to make himself anew.
And he had done just that. The name had allowed it; to some extent, the name had demanded it: strong and a bit patrician. There had been Patrick Henry, after all, a statesman and an orator. In the early days, during those conversations where he had felt himself to be at sea, surrounded by people wealthier and better connected than he would ever be, by people utterly at ease in the world he was so desperately trying to join, he would sometimes allude, though never directly, to a distant but important lineage, invoking false ancestors to stand behind him and lend support.
This was the gift he’d tried to give Paul: a place in the world that no one could question.
The water between his feet was brown, edged with a sickly white foam. The wind rose, and his skin became as porous as his suit. The wind was in his blood, and the swirling water flashed, drew closer, and then there was acid in his throat and he was on his hands and knees, the stones cold beneath his hands, vomiting into the wild gray river, heaving until nothing more could be expelled. He lay there for a long time, in the darkness. Finally, slowly, he stood, wiped the back of his hand against his mouth, and walked back into the city.
He sat in the Greyhound terminal all night, dozing and jerking awake, and in the morning he caught the first bus to his childhood home in West Virginia, traveling deep into the hills that surrounded him like an embrace. After seven hours, the bus stopped where it always had, on the corner of Main and Vine, and then roared away, leaving David Henry in front of the grocery store. The street was quiet, a newspaper plastered against a telephone pole and weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk. He’d worked in this store to earn his room and board above it, the smart kid come down from the hills to study, astonished by the sounds of bells and traffic, the housewives shopping, the schoolchildren clustering to buy sodas at the fountain, the men gathering in the evenings, spitting tobacco and playing cards and passing the time with stories. But that was gone now, all of it. Red and black graffiti covered the plywood-covered windows, bleeding into the grain, unreadable.
Thirst was a fire in David’s throat. Across the street, two men, middle-aged, one bald, one with thin graying hair to his shoulders, sat playing checkers on the porch. They looked up, curious, suspicious, and for a moment David saw himself as they would, his pants stained and wrinkled, his shirt a day and night old, his tie gone, his hair flattened from his fitful sleep on the bus. He did not belong here, never had. In the narrow room above the store, books spread